Autocomplete finishes your sentence before you do. ChatGPT will draft a whole paragraph on any topic in about eight seconds. It has never been easier for a student to avoid the actual work of writing. It has also, in my view, never been more important that they learn to do it anyway. Here is why I still teach writing the way I do.
Writing is not just how you say what you think
A reader wrote a letter to the New York Times a while back that I keep coming back to. She was reflecting on her mother's view of writing, and she said this:
Language is not merely how we express ourselves. It is one of the ways we become ourselves. We write in order to find out what we think, we revise in order to discover whether or not we believe it, and we speak, stumble, clarify, retract, and try again in order to understand the space between ideas and truth.
That paragraph captures the entire reason I have kept teaching writing for 30 years. Writing is not just a way to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper. It is a way of forming the thoughts in the first place. When a child sits down to write a paragraph, they discover what they actually think about the topic. When they revise, they discover whether they actually believe what they wrote. That process is not decorative. It is thinking made visible.
What happens when a kid outsources the writing
The problem with letting an AI write your essay is not primarily that it is cheating, though it is. The problem is that the essay was supposed to do something for the student, and if a machine wrote it, the student never got the thing the essay was supposed to give them.
When a 7th grader is assigned to write about a book they read, the grade at the top of the paper is not the point. The point is that they spend 45 minutes forcing their unformed thoughts about the book into paragraphs, discover halfway through that their first idea was wrong, rewrite it, discover that the rewrite has a hole, patch the hole, and end up with a slightly clearer understanding of the book than they had when they started. That understanding is the thing the assignment was designed to produce.
If ChatGPT writes the paragraph, the student turns in a grade-worthy paper and gets none of the understanding. Over the course of a school year, hundreds of small "understanding moments" get skipped. The student's grade looks the same. Their thinking gets weaker.
Why this matters more, not less, as AI gets better
You could argue that in a world where AI handles writing for us, the skill of writing becomes obsolete. I hear a version of this from parents occasionally. My response is that it gets the causation backward. In a world where AI can generate text at will, the humans who can still think clearly, argue coherently, and evaluate what an AI has produced are the ones who will have real leverage. Those humans will overwhelmingly be the ones who learned to write.
An adult who has never written a real essay cannot tell whether the AI-generated draft they just received is any good. They cannot see the missing counterargument. They cannot notice the sentence that sounds sophisticated but does not actually say anything. They are entirely dependent on the machine's output being correct, and entirely unable to catch it when it is not.
An adult who has written hundreds of paragraphs by hand, who has revised, who has argued their way through a stuck first draft, can do all of those things. That capability is going to be worth more in the AI era, not less.
What we still do at Pinecone
Every writing session at Pinecone starts with a pencil. Students draft by hand. They revise by hand. They think out loud with an instructor sitting next to them, asking them why they made the choices they made, and pushing them to defend or change those choices. Most of them will grow up and use AI tools eventually. When they do, they will use them as adults who know what good writing feels like from the inside. That is the whole point.
Writing has not gotten less important because AI got better at producing it. Writing has gotten more important because the capability to think clearly, on your own, without borrowing a machine's brain, is going to be one of the most valuable things your child ever builds.
Our children's writing program is built around exactly this belief. Sessions run twice weekly, individualized to your student. Ability-based, not grade-based.